More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

In January, Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers — including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co. — had started blocking the Internet Archive due to concerns that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. No news publisher has confirmed to Nieman Lab that an AI company has already scraped their content from the Wayback Machine. Still, in the five months since we published our story …

Analysis: 382 news sites, including 342 local outlets, are blocking Internet Archive's crawlers amid AI concerns, an increase from 241 sites in January 2026 (Nieman Lab)

Nieman Lab: Analysis: 382 news sites, including 342 local outlets, are blocking Internet Archive's crawlers amid AI concerns, an increase from 241 sites in January 2026  —  McClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit's archiving bots.